GMail – apply labels to email from group members
Posted by Dataforce
As Noted by Chris recently on IRC, Google Mail lacks a feature in its ability to automatically label/filter messages - you can't do it based on emails from people in a contact group, short of adding a filter with all their email address on it.
At the time it was mentioned this didn't affect me, however later when I got round to adding loads of labels/filters in gmail (yay for, nicely coloured inbox!) to nicely separate things for me I also ran into this problem, so came up with the following python script that does it for me.
It checks messages, sees if the sender is in the contacts, then checks each group to see if there is a label with that group name that is not already set, then checks to see if the contact is in the group, and finally sets the label if everything matches up.
I ran it initially to tag my entire inbox (set "checkAllIndex" to "True" change "ga.getMessagesByFolder(folderName)" to "ga.getMessagesByFolder(folderName, True)") and now have it running on a 15 minute cron (not using loopMode) to tag new messages for me.
Hopefully this will be useful to someone else, I'm not sure how well it works in general, it worked fine for me with ~700 messages at first, however after a few runs (due to regrouping some contacts) I was greeted by an "Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected" message when trying to do anything - This went away after about 20 minutes, but don't say you wern't warned if it happens to you.
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
This script will login to gmail, and add labels to messages for contact groups.
By default the script will only check items from the past 2 days where email
was recieved.
Loop mode can be enabled to save logging in repeatedly from cron.
Loop mode may fail after some time if google kills the session, or gmail
becomes unavailable or so. (Untested in these situations). On the other hand
it may also just keep running indefinetly as if no problem occured, loop mode
is relatively untested and was added as an after thought.
When running in loop mode, it is best to have a crontab entry also that checks
and restarts the script if it dies.
Copyright 2008 Shane 'Dataforce' Mc Cormack
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
"""
# Uncomment the lines below if python can't find libgmail on its own, and edit
# the sys,path.insert to point to where libgmail.py is.
# import sys
# sys.path.insert(0, 'libgmail')
import libgmail
import time
###############################################################################
# Configuration
###############################################################################
# Email Address
email = "YOUR EMAIL HERE"
# Password
password = "YOUR PASS HERE"
# Check all on index, rather than just the first 2 dates found
checkAllIndex = False
# Use Loop (if true the script will keep looping, and sleep between checking
# for new mail to modify)
useLoop = False
# Time in seconds to sleep when looping (300 = 5 mins)
loopTime = 300
# Label Prefix - if group-based labeles are prefixed, set the prefix here.
# (eg "Groups/")
labelPrefix = ""
# What folder to check? ('inbox' or 'all' are probbaly the most common settings)
folderName = 'inbox'
###############################################################################
# Helper classes/methods
###############################################################################
class ContactGroup:
def __init__(self, id, name, contacts):
self.id = id
self.name = name
self.contacts = contacts
def containsContact(self, contact):
for knownContact in self.contacts:
if knownContact[0] == contact.id:
return True
return False
def __str__(self):
return self.name
# Get Contacts and Groups
# Modified from libgmail 0.1.10 to include groups aswell
def getContacts(account):
"""
Returns a GmailContactList object
that has all the contacts in it as
GmailContacts
"""
contactList = []
groupList = []
# pnl = a is necessary to get *all* contacts
myUrl = libgmail._buildURL(view='cl',search='contacts', pnl='a')
myData = account._parsePage(myUrl)
# This comes back with a dictionary
# with entry 'cl'
addresses = myData['cl']
# Now loop through the addresses and get the contacts
for entry in addresses:
if len(entry) >= 6 and entry[0]=='ce':
newGmailContact = libgmail.GmailContact(entry[1], entry[2], entry[4], entry[5])
contactList.append(newGmailContact)
contacts = libgmail.GmailContactList(contactList)
# And now, the groups
for entry in addresses:
if entry[0]=='cle':
newGroup = ContactGroup(entry[1], entry[2], entry[5])
groupList.append(newGroup)
return contacts, groupList
###############################################################################
# Setup
###############################################################################
print "Running.."
print "Use Loop:", useLoop
if useLoop:
print " Loop Time:", loopTime
print "Check all on index:", checkAllIndex
print "Label Prefix:", labelPrefix
print "Checking Folder:", folderName
print "libgmail Version:", libgmail.Version
print ""
# Login to gmail
print "Logging in as", email
ga = libgmail.GmailAccount(email, password)
ga.login()
# Loop at least once.
loop = True;
while loop:
loop = useLoop
print "Getting label names.."
# Get Labels
labels = ga.getLabelNames(refresh=True)
# Get Messages
print "Getting messages.."
inbox = ga.getMessagesByFolder(folderName)
# Get Contacts
print "Getting contacts and groups"
contacts, groups = getContacts(ga)
# Check each thread in the inbox
lastDate = '';
secondDate = False;
for thread in inbox:
# Only check dates we are supposed to.
if not checkAllIndex:
# Get the date
threadDate = thread.__getattr__('date');
# Make sure a date is set
if lastDate == '':
lastDate = threadDate
# If this date is different to the last one do something.
if lastDate != threadDate:
# If we are already on the second date, then we stop now
if secondDate:
break;
# Otherwise, if the new data is a non-time date, we can change to the
# second date.
elif "am" not in threadDate and "pm" not in threadDate:
lastDate = threadDate
secondDate = True
print "Thread:", thread.id, len(thread), thread.subject, thread.getLabels(), thread.__getattr__('date'), thread._authors, thread.__getattr__('unread')
try:
# Current Labels
threadCurrentLabels = thread.getLabels();
# We will add labels here first to prevent dupes
threadLabels = set([])
# Check each message in the thread.
for msg in thread:
print " Message:", msg.id, msg.sender
# Check if sender is a known contact
contact = contacts.getContactByEmail(msg.sender)
if contact != False:
# Check each group for this contact
for group in groups:
# If we have a label with this group name
labelName = labelPrefix+group.name
if (labelName in labels) and (labelName not in threadCurrentLabels):
# And the group contains the contact we want
if group.containsContact(contact):
# Add it to the list
print " Sender Label:", labelName
threadLabels.add(labelName)
except Exception, detail:
print " Error parsing messages:", type(detail), detail
# Now add the labels
for label in threadLabels:
print " Adding Label:", label
thread.addLabel(label)
# If thread was unread, make it unread again.
if thread.__getattr__('unread'):
print " Remarking as unread"
ga._doThreadAction("ur", thread)
if loop:
print ""
print "Sleeping"
time.sleep(loopTime)
else:
print "Done"
On a related note, I've also recently started to use the "Better Gmail 2" addon for firefox (Official page seems down atm, but more info here) mostly for the grouping of labels feature.
Edit: Script will now preserve unread status of threads.
MD5
Posted by Dataforce
I was recently looking at converting an old application from VB6 to Java that used MD5 in its output files as hashes for validation.
The first thing I did was to make a java class that read in the file and checked the hashes, I tried it on a few files and it worked fine, then I found a file that it failed on.
Now, this app wrote all the files using the exact same function, so it seemed odd that 1 of them wouldn't parse and the rest would.
When I looked at the file closer, I found that this one contained some symbols in the output that the others didn't - I eventually figured out that the symbol that was causing the problem was the pound sign (£).
Without going into too much detail, this presented a major problem, the string in question was used as part of the password validation for the app (the output files are encrypted using the password as a key), and the java code was getting different results than the old VB6 code, and was unable to decode the file as a result.
So, this sparked my curiosity a bit, the VB6 code I was using wasn't a built in, it was code I'd gotten elsewhere and used, so I assumed it was faulty code (not that this helped me much, as I needed to get the exact same output, but ignoring that).
I edited the initial form of my application to return the MD5 String for "£" on its own, and got: "d527ca074d412d9d0ffc844872c4603c"
I did the same for my java code and got: "6465dad1d31752be3f3283e8f70feef7"
So now all I needed to do was to see which was right, so I made a quick PHP script, and did the same and got: "d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357" ... Yet another different hash!?
Ok, I thought, md5sum will help me figure out which one is right. one `echo '£' | md5sum -` and I had "67160ce935d7cb5339047b12ad4611cb". Yes, that is correct, a 4th different hash.
So here I was with 4 different hashes and no idea which one was correct.
So after a bit of googling, I discovered that the MD5 RFC (1321) had the source code for a test application in it.
So I extracted the code from the Appendix of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1321.txt and tried to compile it with `gcc md5.c mddriver.c -o mddriver` only to discover that it failed to compile with lots of errors, fortunately this was an easy fix, near the top of mddriver.c, change "#define MD MD5" to "#define MD 5" and then it compiles without problem.
So, I ran "./mddriver -s£" and got the output "MD5 ("£") = d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357" which agreed with what the PHP md5() function gave.
(Its worth noting that `echo '£' | ./mddriver` agreed with md5sum, which made me remember that `echo` appends a "\n", which was why I got a different output, running `echo -n '£' | md5sum` gives the correct result, and would have saved me googling and finding the test suite!)
I tested a few other things and got the following results:
mddriver: d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
PHP: d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
mySQL: d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
python: d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
postgreSQL: d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
md5sum: d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
JavaScript: d527ca074d412d9d0ffc844872c4603c
VisualBasic: d527ca074d412d9d0ffc844872c4603c
Eggdrop: d527ca074d412d9d0ffc844872c4603c
Java (custom): d527ca074d412d9d0ffc844872c4603c
Java (built in): 6465dad1d31752be3f3283e8f70feef7
- JavaScript implementation from http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/
- VisualBasic implementation from http://www.frez.co.uk/freecode.htm#md5;
- Custom Java implementation from http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.Asp?ID=741
There is also a list of MD5 implementations at http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mabzug1/cs/md5/md5.html
----
The differences are primarily due to character encoding in the different languages. (In the case of my app, there was also a flaw in the implementation for strings where (length % 64) is > than 55 as well)
Example:
[07:14:55] [shane@Xion:~]$ php -r 'echo md5(utf8_encode("£"))."\n";'
2ccf59396b3c0958eec4ba721e2d083f
[07:15:01] [shane@Xion:~]$ php -r 'echo md5("£")."\n";'
d99731d14c7750048538404febb0e357
Java: System.out.println((int)'£'); => "163"
PHP: echo ord('£'); => "194"
PHP: echo ord(utf8_encode('£')); => "195"
RSS Feed
Posted by Dataforce
I fixed the rss feed for the site today, its been broken for a while now (it was using a different user name to connect to the SQL DB than the rest of the site, and I changed access permissions on a load of things a while ago).
“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – Act 3″ a Dissapointment
Posted by Dataforce
Despite all the "This was amazing" "fantastic" reviews I seem to find for this everywhere, I found myself dissapointed after watching it.
The first 2 acts were funny and very rewatchable, there was gold bars that became gold liquid, the "Bad Horse" letters and phone calls, Captain Hammer and his "Hammer", they made me laugh and alongside the humor was a kick ass sound track (my personal favourite being "Its a brand new day").
Act 3 on the other hand was a complete change in direction, the songs weren't as good, it wasn't really all that funny (Infact I think the onyl bit I laughed at was him stopping his song to correct the spelling of his name), it suddently became all serious. All in all I found it a rather dissapointing, and somewhat obvious, end and a let down to an otherwise awesome show.
Despite this I'm still going to buy the DVD (and hopefully the OST if one comes out), as I approve of the idea of a web-streamed show (I think there was a push to get a firefly season 2 done in this way at one point) and would like to see more of them.
Yakuake on OS X – Almost
Posted by Dataforce
For a while now (pretty much since I've been using linux) I've been using yakuake, and I've been looking for something similar for OS X (at the moment I tend to ssh from my desktop to my OS X machine to do anything console like).
I found visor which wraps terminal.app, but overall this is a poor replacement primarily for the lack of tab support (I use tabs alot in yakuake, at the moment on my desktop I have ~15 open)
I tried to get yakuake working on OS X a while ago and failed (it wouldn't compile) so gave up, recently however I decided to try again and have made better progress.
This is what I did, its probably not the best way of doing it (for example, the initial 3GB download could probably be reduced).
First off, download the "everything" package from http://mac.kde.org/?id=download (its a torrent)
Open a terminal, and cd to the directory you downloaded kde-mac to and run:
chmod a+x *.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight
Then install the kde.mpkg package contained (this installs everything nicely)
Now, back in the terminal:
sudo /opt/kde4-deps/bin/update-kde-mac.sh
/opt/kde4/bin/kbuildsycoca4
cd ~
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/utils/yakuake/
PATH=/opt/qt4/bin/:${PATH} cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/kde4/
make
sudo make install
sudo /opt/kde4-deps/bin/update-kde-mac.sh
/opt/kde4/bin/kbuildsycoca4
This installs yakuake to /opt/kde4/bin/yakuake.app next to the other kde apps.
If you run it however, the first time it runs it will give you the "choose a key" popup, but after that its not yet possible to do anything, pressing the key shows it attempting to appear but not quite getting there 
Almost
Back to visor I guess
Virtualbox Bridging
Posted by Dataforce
Edit: This is now pretty much unneeded, the new version of VirtualBox seems to handle this all nicely on its own.
As I mentioned in my last post, One of the useful advantages of the network boot setup is that I can use it to quickly install virtual machines.
Now a few things:
- My Desktop is a lot more powerful than my server, so I run the virtual machines on it.
- I use virtualbox rather than vmware.
- All the network boot stuff is on my server not my desktop (obviously)
So in order to allow this, virtualbox needed to be setup to bridge to my existing adapter, this was quite straight forward, pretty much exactly as the manual said.
sudo apt-get install bridge-utils
Edit /etc/network/interfaces, and add
auto br0 iface br0 inet dhcp bridge_ports eth0
Now the next suggestion was to setup a tkap0 device and tell virtualbox to use that, or to use a dynamic configuration.
The dynamic configuration sounded better as it meant I didn't need to remember to add a new tap device for each vm.
The suggested dynamic configuration suggests using kdesu/gksudo and a script in the home dir of the user that will setup and cleaup the tap device (this means inputting your password every tiem you start/stop the VM and requiring a separate script for each user that wants to have a vm with bridging) this seemed rather annoying so I came up with an alternative.
/usr/bin/setuptap
#!/bin/bash
# Make sure we are root
if [ $(whoami) != root ]; then
exit 1;
fi;
# Create an new TAP interface for the user and remember its name.
interface=`VBoxTunctl -b -u ${SUDO_USER}`
# If for some reason the interface could not be created, return 1 to
# tell this to VirtualBox.
if [ -z "$interface" ]; then
exit 1
fi
# Write the name of the interface to the standard output.
echo ${interface}
# Bring up the interface.
/sbin/ifconfig ${interface} up
# And add it to the bridge.
/usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 ${interface}
/usr/bin/cleanuptap
#!/bin/bash
# Make sure we are root
if [ $(whoami) != root ]; then
exit 1;
fi;
# Remove the interface from the bridge. The second script parameter is
# the interface name.
/usr/sbin/brctl delif br0 $2
# And use VBoxTunctl to remove the interface.
VBoxTunctl -d $2
Now these scripts run with sudo as any user will setup the tap device for that user (thats what ${SUDO_USER} is for)
This still requires a password for starting/stopping the VMs tho, so we use
sudo visudo
or if you prefer nano
sudo EDITOR=nano visudo
and add
# Allow virtualbox users to setup/cleanup tap devices %vboxusers ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/setuptap,/usr/bin/cleanuptap
now:
- configure virtualbox to attach the network device to a "host interface"
- leave the Interface name blank (setuptap creates the next available one)
- Setup Application: "sudo /usr/bin/setuptap"
- Terminate Application: "sudo /usr/bin/cleanuptap"
And virtualbox will be able to create/destroy the tap device as needed.
However. there is still one problem, DHCP will not work for these VMs without a little help, so we need to:
sudo apt-get install dhcp3-relay
and answer the questions asked. (DHCP Server IP, and INterface to listen on (br0))
Virtualbox unfortunatly seems to need a little push to actually network boot, so I also use an etherboot iso to actually boot from the network along with the "PCnet-FAST III" adapter type.
and thats all there is to it, you can now network boot and dhcp from virtual machines not hosted on the server.
PXE Goodness
Posted by Dataforce
Another post in under 3 months?
So as you may or may not know from time to time I have the joy of fixing computers for various people. Alot of these fixes result in a reinstall of windows and away.
This is a rather easy enough job, I have a KVM switch that I attach to the machine, pop a windows CD in (I used to have an unattended CD but don't anymore), answer a few questions and then occasionally switch the KVM over to see if the install died or so.
Now this is all well and good except for 2 problems:
- It means I need to keep (or remember to bring) windows CDs at home (where I do most of my jobs)
- I recently had a machine to fix that had a non-working CD Drive
Now, the first one isn't so much of a problem, but the second one was.
So for some reason known only to him, my dad a while ago decided to invest in an External CD Writer rather than an internal one, so I do have a USB cd drive.
First port of call was to attach the CD Drive, pop in the CD, reboot the machine, tell it to boot from usb... oh, it doesn't recognise the drive. bugger.
So I googled a bit, There was lots of suggestions mostly to use a floppy disk with the USB drivers to bootstrap the install (no thanks, I doubt I 6 (yes, SIX!) working floppies required to bootstrap the windows installer).
Then I remembered ages ago when I was making my unattended CD, I discovered an app called (shockingly) "unattended" (link) so I updated the copy of unattended I had on my server and went to investigate how to use it
The main suggested methods:
- Burn a CD
- Create a boot floopy
Neither of these were appealing (Floppies suck, I probably don't have a spare floppy anywhere that works) and the reason I was even looking at this was because the machine had no CD Drive.
However there was an alternative, network booting. Quickly check the back of the laptop, bingo! a network port!
So, I quickly (I say quickly, but my server was still Redhat 9 at the time, so rather slowly and painfully) I installed the tftp server (apt-get install tftp-hda on ubuntu), configured xinet.d (see below) and my dhcp server (see below).
xinet.d/tftp:
# default: off
# description: The tftp server serves files using the trivial file transfer \
# protocol. The tftp protocol is often used to boot diskless \
# workstations, download configuration files to network-aware printers, \
# and to start the installation process for some operating systems.
service tftp
{
socket_type = dgram
port = 69
protocol = udp
wait = yes
user = root
server = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
server_args = -s /tftpboot
disable = no
per_source = 11
cps = 100 2
flags = IPv4
}
dhcpd.conf:
# Not sure if this is needed, I added it anyway allow bootp; # My Servers IP next-server 192.168.0.5; # PXE Boot filename "pxelinux.0";
pxelinux.0 and its config directory can be found in bootdisk/tftpboot in the unattended distribution.
I also configured my internal DNS server as required by unattended to provide the ntinstall host.
This allowed me to boot up the machine using the network and install windows as normal (There are a few issues with this, namely that the windows xp installer sucks and requires a fat32 partition for swap space, so you can't use unattended to upgrade an existing ntfs install, it has to format the drive as fat32, install, convert it to ntfs, and defrag it)
This made me quite pleased, I copied my windows disks into the install/os directory, and my office disk into the appropriate directory (see the unattended site for all related configuration etc) and left it be.
A few days later I after I restarded one of my machines, it managed to network boot itself into the unattended menu rather than the hard disk, I quickly googled to find out how to make it boot its main hard drive, it gets IP 192.168.0.10, so I created /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8000A with the contents:
default local label local localboot 0
This then prompted me to look at the pxelinux config a bit more, Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to install ubuntu OR windows using network boot? Yes, it would. I also threw in network boot support for DBAN aswell.
my /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default now looks something like this:
DEFAULT menu.c32
PROMPT 0
MENU TITLE Network Boot Options
LABEL disk
MENU LABEL ^Local Disk Boot
MENU DEFAULT
LOCALBOOT 0
LABEL unattended
MENU LABEL ^Unattended Windows Install
KERNEL /unattended/bzImage
APPEND initrd=unattended/initrd
LABEL autonuke
MENU LABEL DBAN ^Autonuke
KERNEL /dban/kernel.bzi
APPEND initrd=dban/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 init=/rc nuke="dwipe --autonuke" silent
LABEL dban
MENU LABEL ^DBAN normal
KERNEL /dban/kernel.bzi
APPEND initrd=dban/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 init=/rc nuke="dwipe" silent
MENU SEPARATOR
LABEL -32
MENU LABEL Ubuntu i386:
MENU DISABLE
LABEL 32install
MENU LABEL Ubuntu i386 Install
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
APPEND vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz --
LABEL 32cli
MENU LABEL Ubuntu i386 CLI
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
APPEND tasks=standard pkgsel/language-pack-patterns= pkgsel/install-language-support=false vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz --
LABEL 32expert
MENU LABEL Ubuntu i386 Expert
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
APPEND priority=low vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz --
LABEL 32cli-expert
MENU LABEL Ubuntu i386 Expert CLI
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
APPEND tasks=standard pkgsel/language-pack-patterns= pkgsel/install-language-support=false priority=low vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz --
LABEL 32rescue
MENU LABEL Ubuntu i386 Rescue
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
APPEND vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz rescue/enable=true --
MENU SEPARATOR
LABEL -64
MENU LABEL Ubuntu x68_64:
MENU DISABLE
LABEL 64install
MENU LABEL Ubuntu x86_64 Install
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
APPEND vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz --
LABEL 64cli
MENU LABEL Ubuntu x86_64 CLI
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
APPEND tasks=standard pkgsel/language-pack-patterns= pkgsel/install-language-support=false vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz --
LABEL 64expert
MENU LABEL Ubuntu x86_64 Expert
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
APPEND priority=low vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz --
LABEL 64cli-expert
MENU LABEL Ubuntu x86_64 Expert CLI
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
APPEND tasks=standard pkgsel/language-pack-patterns= pkgsel/install-language-support=false priority=low vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz --
LABEL 64rescue
MENU LABEL Ubuntu x86_64 Rescue
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
APPEND vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz rescue/enable=true --
I can now boot the local hdd (default, incase I don't want any of the network boot options), securely wipe drives, install windows (via unattended), or use any of the features from the ubuntu disks (both 64bit and 32bit).
I would like to add some other options at a later date such as BSD/Solaris Installers or knoppix network boot as the main use for this are for fixing PCs for people (hense windows and knoppix) and a side benefit of making installing OSs in VMs easier (VM network boots to the boot menu for me to install from)
If anyone wants to know more about the setup or has any questions, just use the comment form.
Updates!
Posted by Dataforce
So, it was brought to my attention that I havn't actually updated this in a while, so here you go, an update! (However dissapointing you might find it!)
Ok, so the most important update of recent is that I finally (after 4 years of being out of date) upgraded the OS on my server from Redhat 9 (EOL April 2004!) to the ubuntu server 8.04 ("Hardy Heron").
This also as a result of to a change in iptables between the ancient 2.4.30 Kernel and the current 2.6.24 prompted me to rewrite my IPTables firewall scripts (As the old one broke stuff, like my multiple IPs - which in turn managed to break logging into Authgate in a fun way!).
For anyone who is interested, they can be downloaded here.
Once downloaded, extract them to a directory (I use /root and thus they are currently configured as such) and edit the "nat" file to change the main settings.
You can then run it by using:
/bin/bash /root/nat
(Change to suit where you extracted to)
I have also included shape.php, which allows you to setup traffic shaping for People >:E
It needs configuring separately to the main script, and is called by nat-shape.sh (which is called by the main script).
Once you have configured shape.php you will need to edit nat-shape.sh to make it actually call it (remove the first echo, and remove the # from the start of the other 2 lines)
The next thing I've done recently is to tidy up the DMG generation script for DMDirc.
Now it manages to create compressed images on linux aswell as on OS X, and doesn't require stupidly ugly code or a patched version of Apples DiskDev tools!
And finally I'm now back home for the next 4 months rather than at uni, yay for no more stupid download cap! (Seriously, 20GB for a whole month kills me!)
OpenID
Posted by Dataforce
Recently I finally finished adding support for AuthGate to be an OpenID Provider.
This prompted Chris to develop Poidsy, which I have also implemented into AuthGate. This allows people to login to AuthGate (and thus also here, and other AuthGate powered sites) using OpenID instead of having to register with AuthGate itself.
News comment posting changes
Posted by Dataforce
I've made a few small changes to comment posting on here.
Firstly, if you are logged in, you will not have to enter the captcha that non-logged users have to enter.
Secondly, the original poster of the article (usually me 
) will have a * next to their name in the comments.
Thirdly. Posts posted by logged in users with the appropriate user level (ie people who have posting access, aka me) have their username in blue to make them stand out.
Finally comments by non logged in users have (Guest) next to them
These changes also affect all previous comments posted 